Comic Report #42.1 - Just Around The Corner (Patreon)

Hello again!  Thank you for your patience with the last week.  This week I got my inking done and painted about half the page.  It's been a while so I'll get right into posting about my process right away!

When I was planning this page I knew there would be two "difficult" panels to paint, specifically panels 2 and 4.  Any time there's a depth of field shot I need to be conscious of lighting within space and it takes me more time to build, as opposed to shots where the camera points at a wall, where I can just imply light sources with gradients and drop a cast shadow on the wall to describe depth and call it a day.  This page is mostly the latter shots, the wall shots, and that's making it really easy to knock out, but the two panels with real depth are my current roadblocks to work through.  

Panel 4 shows my approach to working through these kinds of shots, as it's about half-done.  A while ago I used to paint all the figures in first and then put the background after them, but nowadays I'll do about 60% of the background first and then paint the figure layer, and then finish up the background.  Doing it in that order lets me make sure the contextual lighting is appropriate on the figure, and starting out by blocking in the major background shapes as their local value makes sure I can fit those shapes around each other in a way that gives me the most atmospheric bang for my buck.  A lot of making sure a character pops is making sure their contrast with the background values around them is strong enough that they don't get lost in the visual noise, which was a problem my earliest pages had. You can see in panel 4 how I tried to make the spotlight cone area just outside the mop placement, so I can keep the dark contrast around the shape of the mop head and then give its interior lighting the contrast to pop.

I should be able to finish this page by the end of this weekend, and then have it up and ready to go by Monday (the day).  Once I get through panel 4 the rest should be a breeze.  Once that's done I'll start work on Monday (the man)'s victory animations for the game, and then begin work on the next comic page on the next work cycle after that.  Thank you for your patience with the comic, I'll see you again soon with a finished wordless art post!